Dragon Sisters

This is the story of a girl, a daughter of an Emperor, who is starting to learn how to navigate and survive palace intrigue, and the dragon who comes to help her. The story's pacing felt a bit odd to me at times, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment of it, and I wondered if what was odd to me was normal in the Chinese culture in which this story is set. Pacing that feels odd to me is a small price to pay for expanding the perspectives I read, and the story itself is quite good. One fun feature is that the author has interspersed recipes for some of the foods described in the story, which I enjoyed as an invitation to pause and imagine the characters' experiences a little more deeply. This book is two short stories in one, but they are so closely linked that I think you can't read one without the other, so I'm considering it as a single novella.